Entertainment

SoundHound Adds Real-Time Lyrics to Music Recognition

Hot on the heels of music recognition service Shazam's addition of a new feature called LyricPlay, competitor SoundHound is out with its own offering: LiveLyrics.

LiveLyrics launches Wednesday as part of version 4.0 [iTunes link] of the free and paid versions of the SoundHound app for iOS. Now, when users identify a song using SoundHound, they can also pull up lyrics, which begin scrolling in time to the music. Users can also access lyrics when playing music on their own Apple iOS devices, and tap on words to skip to that section of the song.

At launch, the service will have lyrics for 500,000 tracks, but it hopes to expand to 1 million songs by the end of the year.

Shazam released a similar offering in June, but Aaron Master, SoundHound's director of user experience, says "it's not even comparable." Shazam launched with 25,000 tracks, he points out, while SoundHound has 500,000. He also points out that SoundHound's feature is free to all users, not just those using the paid app. Personally, however, I'm more partial to Shazam's campy karaoke-esque scrolling lyrics — SoundHound's a bit less graphically inventive.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.